Port Hawkesbury Paper Corp. must buy softwood from private landowners as part of its deal with the province to access Crown land, though the landowners say they aren’t getting a fair price.

The province released the 10-year licence agreement, Friday. It comes with options for 10-year renewals and gives the company access to a huge tract of Crown land — 522,000 hectares — an area a little bigger than Richmond and Inverness counties combined.

It’s two-thirds of the Crown land available for harvest and one-third of provincial Crown land overall, according to the Natural Resources Department.

The stumpage rate the company will pay to the province was redacted, as was much of the information on the biomass-fuelled power generation project.

Natural Resources spokesman Dan Davis said the information was withheld because releasing it would put the company and/or province at a competitive disadvantage in other negotiations.

While not revealing the stumpage rate, the province said taxpayers will be getting more for their wood than they did from former mill owner and licensee NewPage Port Hawkesbury.

Julie Towers, the executive director of renewable resources with Natural Resources, said the take should add up to several hundred thousand dollars more.

Natural Resources Minister Charlie Parker said the licence includes a number of improvements over the agreement with the former operator of the Point Tupper paper mill, which was more than 50 years old.

The new agreement contains a new condition that requires the mill owner to buy at least 200,000 green metric tonnes of pulpwood a year, plus up to 200,000 green metric tonnes of biomass fuel, from private suppliers. “Green” means recently cut trees.

Parker said the province wanted to help support private landowners with those provisions.

“We have over 30,000 small woodlot owners in this province. (Port Hawkesbury Paper has) to buy their wood from a mix of both Crown and private, and it’s trying to keep that balance,” Parker told reporters in Halifax.

But Russell Huntington, owner of MB Pulp in Marion Bridge, told The Chronicle Herald this week that Port Hawkesbury Paper was offering him $43 a tonne for pulpwood, which cost him $48.50 to produce last year. NewPage was paying $48 to $51 a tonne.

Cape Breton West Tory Alfie MacLeod has brought Huntington’s example to the floor of the legislature, and said Friday that private landowners need a profit to stay in business.

“My understanding, from a couple of the individuals I’ve talked to, is that it’s sort of a take it or leave it attitude, and I don’t think that’s the way business should be done,” MacLeod said.

In the House, Parker told MacLeod that it was a free market system and he encouraged woodlot owners to work with the company.

The minister also said another highlight of the agreement is the fact it gives the province control over the land, where under the old Stora Act, the province needed the company’s agreement to use the land.

There’s also a new provision for Port Hawkesbury Paper to sell sawlogs to sawmills.

Another part of the licence requires the company to enter written agreements with certain sawmills for the supply of wood and if that’s not done, the province could allow a third party access to the Crown land licenced to Port Hawkesbury Paper.

The company gets access to about the same amount of land NewPage had, but can cut only about half the amount of wood NewPage was allowed. The average amount NewPage cut over the last five years was only about half its permitted amount, provincial figures show.

Parker said the reduced amount is primarily because the new owner is running one paper machine instead of two.

Towers said the amount of land involved is about the same because the softwood the mill needs is scattered around.

Matt Miller, forestry program co-ordinator with the Ecology Action Centre, said the deal is definitely better than the old one, but he’d like to see some assurances the hardwood would go for the highest-value end use and not just burned as biomass to generate electricity.

“My concern is that the biomass facility will be the primary asset that that hardwood resource is managed for, with value-added hardwood mills taking what’s left over from that,” he said.

“It would have been better to empower those mills with the opportunity to manage that resources for themselves and have that the biomass facility take what’s left over.”

The centre also raised concerns about a couple of other provisions that became public earlier this fall.

About 59,000 hectares of high-value conservation land the province is considering for protection is included in the agreement, though the company can’t touch it until the province decides whether it will be protected.

The centre argued that land should have been left out of the licence until the decision was made. The agreement says that will happen by Dec. 31, 2014.

The centre was also concerned that there could be a future change to the requirement that Port Hawkesbury Paper maintain Forest Stewardship Council certification, which lays out standards for responsible forest management.

The province and company agreed there could be a different type of certification, but Parker said the clause on allows for the adoption of a more stringent standard, if one is developed.

The licence agreement took effect Sept. 27, a week before the first paper in a year rolled off the supercalendered paper machine in Point Tupper.

The land deal would end if the mill shuts down for a year, or sooner if the company tells the province it’s closing.

The Crown licence agreement was one of the company’s requirements to restart the mill. The province contributed $125 million in assistance to Stern Partners of British Columbia, which established an affiliate company to own the mill.